Living tradition
Coffee grounds
Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and Armenia; arrived in Europe with Ottoman coffee.
You drink unfiltered coffee, turn the cup onto the saucer and read the shapes in the grounds (bird, path, ring) by zones.
How it's done
- 01Turn the cup three times and tip it for a minute.
- 02The rim is what's near; the bottom, what's far.
- 03Name the shapes before you interpret them.
With your own tools
Turkish or boiled coffee, never capsules; and the cup is always read by someone else, not the drinker.
With Ocluna
Photograph the bottom of your cup and Ocluna plays that other person: it finds the symbols and tells you.
What Madame Iselda tells you
- Coffee reached the Balkans with the Ottomans in the 16th century, and with it the custom of turning the cup over and reading the grounds.
- In Serbia and Greece the rule is that you never read your own cup: someone else always reads it.
- In Bosnia, coffee is served in a small handleless cup called a fildžan, a word derived from Turkish; to invert the cup and read the grounds, one with a handle is used instead.
- Bosnian home coffee is brewed in a copper džezva and served with a sugar cube and a lokum; the thick sediment is what makes the reading possible.
This reading is symbolic self-knowledge and entertainment content based on folk traditions. It does not predict the future, is not medical, legal or financial advice, and does not replace qualified professionals.